2 Chapter 2
"Ding! Please explore the following options!"
Status - This will show you what you currently have equipped, break down your total effects as simple to read numbers, and give details on any status abnormalities you might have.
Crafting - This menu allows you to see all the schematics you currently have that can be crafted by you. Some items you can craft as long as you have the materials anywhere you go while some require specialized tools or workstations in order to create. Details can be found in each schematic.
Perks - Every time you level up and as rewards for different quests/challenges you earn perk points which can be used to unlock permanent but passive effects.
Skills - Skills are active abilities that you must activate that can do a wide range of things related to combat or survival. You gain skills from rewards as well as a choice of a skill from a selection presented every five levels.
Inventory - Currently you have 20 fully unlocked inventory slots, 20 overburdened slots, and 80 locked slots. Each slot can hold a stack of up to 30k of a single item. Can hold any size item and reduces the weight of the items to zero. Stops time and changes to anything placed inside the inventory. Items placed in the overburdened slots can still be carried by the system but apply a portion of their weight to your real world body, slowing you down and increasing energy needed to move about freely.
Quests - This screen is where you can view your main quest timer, side quests offered or found, challenges, and your current score in this world.
Map - The map automatically fills in the geography of the area around you in the world as you explore the world. You can also place pins and notes on areas of interest. Fast travel is an option in some worlds or with certain technologies.
Game Options - This screen is where you can do a number of things to make your player experience better. You can turn on or off the Heads up Display that shows in your daily vision. You can adjust the brightness of the world around you. You can system notification settings, opacity of system screens, if you want time to freeze when interacting with your system, if you want a minimap to appear, and if you want basic information to pop up over any allies, enemies, or neutral beings in the world around you.
I immediately focused on the Game Options screen and after pulling it up I started setting up my own personal video game style HUD. I turned on my personal status bars which would show me my total Hit Points and Stamina Points, a bar that showed my current food and water levels, a compass with a clock along the top of my vision, placed the minimap in the upper right corner of my vision, as well as turning on detailed vision which would allow me to see the names, threat level, HP, and any other information the system deemed as important to my survival on screen with a single glance.
It took me only a few minutes to adjust all of my "on screen" options until they just felt natural and useful to me. I found a few other options buried inside this screen that I tinkered with, turning on the ones I liked, such as being able to see the current durability of any object in front of me. For example if I look at a tree I can see how much durability it has left that I need to deplete before the system considers it to be cut down and added as raw materials to my inventory, if I have room that is. Or I can look at the door on a house I want to potentially loot and see if it's locked or not and how much damage is left on it before it would completely collapse. Small options but useful nonetheless to someone with a System.
I played with the other screens as well but didn't find much of immediate interest other than the leveling "tree" as it were inside the perks screen. There were over a hundred perks, each with multiple levels of benefit, that could be invested into allowing me to do more damage to enemies, take less damage, need less food and water, gather more loot, gather materials faster or in greater quantity, gain faster recovery abilities for both SP and HP, and even unlock huge blocks of items that can be crafted using the system.
The perks were a bit overwhelming to be honest and since nighttime looked like it would be very dangerous to be out and about, especially in this world since the zombies became faster and more aggressive, I would use that time to dive deeper into the trees and figure out what kind of build I want to go for. Hopefully by dark I would not only have a passable and defensible home base but I might also have gained a few levels as well to be able to start putting into whatever build I settle on.
I assigned my crossbow and my small folding camp knife to my quick access bar that was floating along the bottom of my vision. This allowed me to easily swap back and forth as needed or even store them both away leaving my hands free for whatever task I needed. After getting everything settled in I started making my way towards the town I had seen in the distance.
I took my time, moving slowly, while I carefully examined the world around me to get a better feel as to what resources might be in the area, what threats are moving around, and how to use my system to gather information I needed to survive. When I stopped to examine a tree it would show a small overlay tag with the durability, the type of tree, potential loot that can be gathered, and other such information. Imagining that some fist sized rocks might make for good ranged zombie skull crushing items or tools to distract away dangerous mobs that hadn't discovered me yet I started scanning the ground around me as I slowly walked and found a dozen decent sized rocks, storing them into my inventory.
When I pulled up my inventory and selected the rock stack, preparing to move it to my quick toolbar, I noticed that the additional information tab that popped up showed me two things. First, these rocks counted as crafting materials and after placing them into my inventory they were stored by the system into a standardized size and shape. Secondly, and most importantly, there was an option attached to the item that allowed me to see all schematics that I currently had access to that would use stone as a needed material to make.
This was how I found out that stones I can find just about anywhere can be used to make campfires, building materials for homes or reinforcement for defenses, ammunition for slingshots, and even simple stone tools. It was the stone tools that most caught my eye at the moment however as the information I had in my head regarding survival games and situations indicated that being able to efficiently gather and make use of resources is one of the biggest keys to successful survival. You can't make an impregnable castle or bunker without tools and materials, you can't cook a filling meal without ingredients, and you can't defend yourself without arms and armor.
I scrolled through the schematics until I found simple stone tools and decided I would most likely need a simple stone axe (which appears to be used for gathering wood, stone, and ore), a simple stone shovel, and a simple stone spear. That should cover most scenarios I can think of in the short term as far as gathering materials for crafting while also giving me a ranged melee weapon for areas where a crossbow would be as effective. I could use my camp knife but that still means getting closer to the undead than I feel comfortable with at the moment.
I needed to gather some plant fiber and wood in order to craft everything so I started experimenting and found that and long tufts of grass or random weeds could be plucked and once they were placed into my inventory they were converted into generic plant fibers, wood was much the same as any stick or branch that was over a certain size or weight was converted into generic wood in the inventory as well.
It only took me a few minutes and I was able to craft the stone axe, stone shovel, and stone spear which I quickly added to my quickbar and then practiced changing back and forth from before taking a few test swings with each. One thing that I noticed is that my Stamina Points, or SP, operated much like the System had mentioned HP does. When I have HP, all damage affects that bar acting like a shield and only after it hits 0 does my actual body start taking real damage.
SP is very similar in that as long as my SP bar is above 1 point I don't feel any kind of fatigue or stress from physical activities. I chopped down a small tree and after 10-15 swings of the stone axe my SP bar would bottom out, not in a video game this just means you either couldn't swing again until you let your SP regen or your swings are just much weaker than normal, but in this world I could keep swinging but I wouldn't even notice the weight of the axe in my hands, the exertion needed for each swing, or the rubbing of the handle in my palms until my SP was gone. If I let my SP regen, which is fairly quick surprisingly, then I can basically chop down trees all day long or dig holes or mine big rocks, it basically turned me into a machine capable of performing amazing feats of physical activity.
My food and water levels are directly connected to my HP and SP levels and their ability to regen as well. When I had any amount of food or water left on the bar I felt no hunger and no thirst, if they hit zero then I would feel hungry and thirsty just like any other person and at similar intervals. This was a pretty unique feeling I have to admit and definitely gives me a huge leg up on others.
When I finished chopping down my first tree, as a test, it slowly fell until it crashed into the ground, setting off a large racket. Unlike with other smaller items it didn't automatically go into my inventory, which I am actually fine with since I don't want others to easily know about my abilities at a glance, but instead gave me the option to either use the system to store and process it or to let it be processed manually without the system. If you choose not to use the system its just a huge tree laying on the ground unless you cut it up and figure out how to use it.
The noise of the tree falling was obviously quite loud and it had attracted the attention of several slow moving zombies that had been a couple hundred meters away. There were currently three that I could see, that were now moving in my direction from different directions. I decided now was the time to see how hard they were to take down, at least during the day time, so I pulled out my crossbow and then found a nice open area to wait for my first undead guest to arrive.
The zombies were moving fairly slowly, so if they all moved like this during the daytime they shouldn't be a huge threat unless I encountered large numbers of them. I waited patiently while I carefully examined the crossbow and played around with a couple of the game options I had enabled. The first was a shrinking crosshair option, this basically showed me, floating in the area, the area in which the shot COULD land, when firing from the hip. When I pulled up the weapon to actually aim and use it like most normal people would, it gave me a special red dot that as long as I put the dot on where I wanted to hit, and was within the effective range of the weapon, I would hit that spot.
I tested the red dot aiming down the sight on the first approaching undead. This undead was wearing coveralls, work boots, a wife beater shirt, and a dirty ball cap, the quintessential farmer zombie. When it got within about a hundred meters it popped up some information.
Name - Farmer Zombie
Type - Tier 1 Zombie
HP - 75/75
Weak spots - Head, brain, spine
Exp Value - 10
I carefully lined up my shot with the crossbow, placing the red dot right on it's forehead even though it felt weird because the iron sight on the crossbow was off quite a bit, and when I squeezed the trigger the bolt blasted forward and punched through the zombies forehead with no hesitation. I looked down at the crossbow and then looked over at the zombie still over 90 meters away but now dead on the ground and started feeling giddy with excitement. If it was this easy to get headshots with ranged weapons… he was going to be a zombie killing machine!
"Ding! Killed a Farmer Zombie x 1! Combat complete. Total exp gained - 10"
Quickly checking my experience points to the next level tracker on my HUD I saw that 10 exp had gotten me a tenth of the way to level 2. So 90 exp or 9 more kills to get my first level. That seems more than doable honestly, especially if I can recover and reuse the crossbow bolts. I waited for the next closest zombie to approach and decided to try out a couple of other options. The crossbow tooltip stated that it does 30 damage per bolt with a 400% stealth damage bonus and a 3x weak spot damage multiplier so I wanted to see how that worked exactly as I assumed that hitting the zombie in the head had triggered the 3x damage which would be 90 points, 15 more points of damage than the zombie had in HP.
The second zombie was finally in range of me being able to look at it and see information pop up in my vision.
Name - Random Civilian Zombie Male
Type - Tier 1 Zombie
HP - 75/75
Weak spots - Head, brain, spine
Exp Value - 10
I aimed for the zombie's chest this time and fired a bolt. The rush of wind as the projectile flew through the air was sharp and the solid thump of the impact as the bolt collided solidly with the zombie was quite noticeable. The transferred kinetic energy from the bolt hitting the undead in the upper chest just as it was taking another shambling step forward was enough to throw the zombie off its feet and it landed on its back like a sack of potatoes hitting the earth.
Checking the zombies information I saw that I was correct, the bolt had removed exactly 30 HP leaving the zombie with 45 remaining. I took my time to reload, this time aiming for its left knee while it was still slowly struggling on the ground to resume its path towards fresh meat… me. Firing the crossbow again the bolt hit the zombie's knee accurately and I could clearly hear the sound of the bone and cartilage there shattering with a loud crackling noise. It honestly reminded me of the sound of firecrackers but much quieter and I shuddered a little at the thought of how much that must have hurt… if the zombie were still alive anyways.
The zombie, after I checked, still had 15 HP remaining but I had confirmed that you could debilitate the undead, if needed, greatly reducing their already minor threat level. Lastly, I decided to test the last thing I was really concerned about and fired one more bolt into the zombies chest again. The bolt slammed home and I received another System notification indicating I had received another ten experience points. This confirmed that while zombies could be more quickly killed with a shot to the head they could still be killed in other ways. This means traps and potentially other forms of life taking might work as well, so I need to get my hands on various poisons and acids to try in addition to some simple traps that should work well.
I was thinking about how easy it would be with stamina points to dig deep pit traps, line them with stakes, and then lure zombies into them. Even if they don't die right away I am sure I can just dump some gas or kerosene on top of whatever survives the fall and light it up right? Maybe some steel cable whip lines using heavy weights from high heights to rapidly cause a slack cable to tighten acting like a steel whip and cutting the undead in half. Definitely some deadfalls to drop heavy items on the dead from above, crushing their heads but I would potentially circle back to these in the future.
I put away my crossbow and pulled out my stone spear, feeling very much like I had reverted to my cavemen ancestors, as I practiced swinging and stabbing with the slightly awkward stick with a semi sharp rock attached to the end of it. I had seen several other early stage weapons that I could craft when I made the spear and depending on how this felt I may have to switch to one of those instead. The tooltip for the stone spear stated it would do 18 damage per stab, 10 damage for any other type of strike, so the damage per hit was obviously lower but since I didn't need to reload or worry about ammo supplies it might work out better in time after I got used to it.
While waiting for the last zombie to approach I moved over to the bodies of the first two and wasn't surprised that I could retrieve my bolts, well most of them as the one that hit the zombies knee had pierced through and broken on a rock in the dirt underneath. I also found that the zombie bodies were lootable. I mean System lootable, I figured I would be able to scrounge through the pockets of the dead and maybe find the occasional goody.
Keeping one eye on the approaching zombie I used the System loot on the first body and a small circle countdown timer that started at 5 appeared. When the number hit zero a loot container screen popped up showing that there were just some basic cloth scraps which I quickly looted into my inventory. I then went through the process of carefully looting the body manually since I wanted any extra goodies but didn't really feel like being covered in gore if I could avoid it. The first zombie had two surprisingly good items, a small .38 pistol in a holster on his ankle that was still fully loaded with 6 rounds and a folding camp saw which could be used to cut down branches and wood into more easily usable chunks.
.38 Caliber Snub Nosed Revolver, Non-crafted
Damage per Shot - 75
Magazine Size - 6
Max Range - 25 feet
Ammo Type - Any .38 caliber bullets
System Note - A simple short range slug thrower that is best used as a last resort or hidden on your person in case you end up in a bad situation to be used as an emergency trump card. The craftable version of this weapon is vastly superior.
Folding Camp Saw, 10 inch
Melee Damage per Hit - 11 points
System Note - A simple serrated blade designed for sawing small pieces of wood around camp for fires, simple constructions, and can be used as a weapon in a pinch.
I threw them both into my inventory while also adding the revolver to my quick toolbar so I could have easy access before checking to see the last zombie still far enough away to be safe and then looting the second corpse. The System loot function gained me a 1 liter bottle of purified water, which seemed to be a higher quality drink than the water bottles I had gained earlier, as well as several jars of what appeared to be crystal clear moonshine. I stored them away and then manually checked the body, only turning up a small box of matches, a small roll of different denominations of dollar bills, and some gold jewelry in a small felt drawstring bag.
I stored it all away because I didn't know why but I had this feeling that even the money and jewelry, which is unlikely to have any value in this world, likely will still be worth quite a bit in other worlds. I then checked the tooltips of the food and water I had from earlier as well as now to compare the differences.
Purified Bottled Water, 1 Liter Plastic Bottle
Restores 100 water meter.
Grants increased SP regeneration for 15 minutes.
When water is consumed in a Chilled status it also grants increased protection against overheating.
Crystal Clear Moonshine, 1 Quart Jar
50 uses
Each use grants the following buffs:
Increase melee damage by 25% for 30 minutes
Reduce all incoming damage by 10% for 30 minutes
Increased morale in whatever form is needed…
Clean Bottle Water, 1 Liter Plastic Bottle
Restores 40 water meter.
Grants increased SP regeneration for 3 minutes.
Can Chili, family size
2 uses
Restores 50 food meter.
Grants satiation buff that increases your perception of the world around you by 25% for 30 minutes.
If food is consumed while in a Heated status grants increased protection against hypothermia.
I love my System, really I do, it's only my first day in this new world and I can already see that other survivors are going to think I am that weird and crazy fucker. They are all going to worried about just getting enough to eat and drink safely for one more day or week of survival while I am that guy going out of his way to hunt down the best ingredients to make truly amazing dishes that many might not have had even before we were thrown into some cosmic survival game reality show. Whatever, I imagine the buffs will be more than worth the weird labels I might get assigned and Gods help any of these people who think of trying to take what is mine by force.
Seeing the zombie had finally wandered close enough for me to need to get ready to take it down and I readied my spear before checking the zombie's tooltip since this zombie looked a little beefier than the first two had been. It was damn near 6 foot 4 inches tall and looked like it was a reject from a Rambo crossover.
Name - Body Builder Zombie
Type - Tier 2 Zombie
HP - 150/150
Weak spots - Head, brain, spine
Exp Value - 20
System Note - This zombie was obviously once a big guy who liked his "special gym juice" a little too much. Beware, much like gym rats of other worlds who juice, this zombie is known to roid rage as well if not taken down quickly.
"Interesting!" I spit out, speaking for the first time since I woke up in this world. I was a little taken aback by how deep my voice sounded but pushed the thought aside as I waited for the hulked out zombie to approach close enough that I could shift forward for my first stab. It was kind of funny actually but my body felt like it knew exactly how best to use the spear as my body moved and tensed in certain ways to let me accurately and explosively stab the zombie in the head.
I surged forward, the spear leading the way, as it smashed into the head of the zombie, I had hit the zombie in the cheek rather than the eye socket I had been aiming for and could see its body rock back from the impact. It felt very satisfying to see and feel the visceral feedback from physically attacking the undead monster, so much so that I almost lost track of the world around me since if I had done this to a human they would likely be disabled. The zombie however, even being rocked back, never lost sight of its single minded attempt to close the distance with me to devour the flesh from my bones. While still recovering its balance, one of the zombie's hands reached up to grasp the spear head in a grip of iron while the other hand reached out towards me, almost getting ahold of my hand where it was holding onto the spear.
The instant before the strong man could reach me my body, thankfully, reacted as I lightly pushed off the ground using the balls of my feet while my upper body and shoulders engaged using the spear as leverage to push myself back a few feet away from the grasp of the monster while also forcing it back as well. I then let go of the spear and took off in a dead sprint to place more distance between us, heading back towards where the first two bodies lay before spinning back to strategize what I would do next. I had managed to put 35 feet or so between us and watched as the zombie was struggling to move forward while the spear was still embedded in its cheek while the blunt end kept bouncing down into the ground and getting stuck preventing it from moving forward easily. The tooltip stated I had only done about 50 damage to the zombie by striking it in the head like I had.
If I wanted to down it safely I had several options including the crossbow and the .38 revolver. I had wanted to try out a couple of other things like how much damage a rock to the dome might do but the System note about this zombie possibly going into a rage state of some kind actually had me concerned. I decided to take the safe route and pulled out the crossbow. It would take two shots to kill the zombie as long as one of them was a headshot, I gauged the distance and my memory of how long a system reload of the crossbow took previously and decided this was the safest bet.
I slowly lined up my first shot and fired the bolt, smiling in grim satisfaction when it slammed into the eye socket on the side of the face opposite of my spear, and calmly began the reload function of the crossbow… before all hell broke loose. It was then, that I knew, that I had fucked up. The instant I started the reload action I got to see first hand as the zombie went into its rage mode. The bolt had hit it squarely in the eye, doing nearly enough damage to kill it, but it suddenly threw its head back and roared, the rage it was feeling coming through very clearly as it went from a shambling monster that was easy to kite and kill into a running mass of muscle set on ripping me apart. I stood there in fear watching as the zombie closed the distance between us, nearly instantly, unable to move because I was locked into the reload action of the crossbow. I can now see how using the System MAY just have some drawbacks after all and it might just cost me life.
I felt like I was a child being slammed into by an NFL linebacker as the zombie barreled into me, taking us both to the ground as it knocked the crossbow out of my hands. I panicked at first, attempting to fight the zombie off, afraid of the snapping teeth and grasping hands. I managed to get that brief flash of panic under control as I saw my HP still above 50 points and realized I was still protected and if I was quick I could finish the zombie before it could do any real harm to me. I mentally focused on the .38 revolver and then quickly unloaded the weapon into the side of the zombie pinning me to the ground. Ok, I admit, I managed to get lucky and wasn't QUITE free of panic as I could have finished him with a single round rather than using all six and leaving me without any further ammo.
Now I just have to figure out how to get out from under this 270 pound mass of dead flesh…
